双语·居里夫人的故事 第十九章　度假

Chapter XIX　Holiday

THERE was a place in Brittany. Pink granite cliffs and rocks ran out into a blue, clear sea that was always calm, because a reef of a thousand islands kept out the Atlantic tumult of the waves. There, in a dip among the rocks was Larcou?st, a group of fishermen's cottages, not even a village, a mere hamlet, where the Breton fishwives went out and in with their wide, white linen bonnets protecting their faces from the wind.

High up on the moor, in the clear path of all the winds and looking like a lighthouse, was Marie's little holiday home, a wisp of a little poor cottage with a glorious view. Marie was a nobody in Larcou?st. The king of the country was a little old hunchback man with smiling eyes behind spectacles, and the palace where he lived was a long, low cottage covered from ground to roof with virginiacreeper, wild red fuchsia, and travellers' joy. It stood in an orchard and was called Taschen-Vihan, which in Breton means “the little orchard field.” Its door was always open, except when the east wind blew, and all the old king's subjects—Marie and Irène and Eve and Frédéric Joliot and children and babies and scientists and writers—in fact all the people who loved him and everybody loved him, visited him all day long and never gave a thought to the fact that he was one of the most learned historians who ever lived, none other than Charles Seignobos whom everybody knows. He had discovered Larcou?st, and every summer the wisest, most learned people of Paris went to make holiday there.

Every morning, Marie in a washed-out linen hat, an old skirt, sandals and the black reefer jacket that all Larcou?stians wore, fishermen and ladies alike, used to take the steep path that led hither and thither down from her moor and ended among the flaming flowers of Taschen's garden.

“Good-morning, Madame Curie,” called Seignobos. “Good-morningt!” echoed the fifteen or so others who were lying about in the grass or the flowers, looking, in their queer rigout, like a company of gypsies.

Marie slung her rucksack on the ground and sat beside it. Larcou?st, like everywhere else, had its severe social distinctions; but they were of a different kind from those in most villages. In Larcou?st people of the lowest rank were called Philistines. They were simply strangers who didn't belong to Larcou?st. Next above them came the people whom you could just know, the Elephants. They were friends, but unfortunate landlubbers, people who were not as comfortable in and on the sea as they were on the land. They were to be pitied, but they could be improved. Above them came the honourable of the place, the Sailors, and then in distant, worship-able dignity, were the Crocodiles, those to whom all the arts of the sea were known. Not only could they swim, they could “crawl” and manage sails and oars among the stiffest currents. Marie had never been a Philistine and had little hope of ever being a crocodile. She had begun as an elephant and had risen to be a sailor.

At a word from Seignobos, the sailors of the day loosed from the fleet of two sailing boats and six rowing boats which were moored at the quay, the pinnace and the dinghy, and sculled them to the rock landing-stage.

“Aboard! aboard!” ordered Seignobos. “I'll row stroke, Madame Curie will row bow; Perrin and Borel to the oars, and Francis, you steer.”

The crews were all professors. The white and green boat went round in a circle, for one pulled too hard. The steersman called his oarsmen to attention: “Bow is not following stroke.” Marie blushed and timed her stroke. The sea rippled under the sun, and the mariners sang:

Three little boys sail for the isles!

Who sail with a boat-load of joys

For the isles, are three little boys. …

At the end of the third song, it was time to change the oars because stronger rowers were needed to take the boats through the current to Roch Vras, the violet-coloured desert island where the Larcou?stians bathed. The men took as their dressing-room the shore which they shared with the brown gulls; the women had a rock chamber carpeted with soft green grass.

Marie was first into the deep transparent water. She was a good swimmer even if she could not do the crawl. In the water she was young again, her gray hairs were hidden under her cap, and no-one could see her wrinkles. She was slender and graceful and quick and deliciously proud of her skill. “Aren't I much better than Borel?” she called to Irène, and Irène, who was no flatterer, could truthfully answer: “Oh much better, Mé. There is no comparison.”

After the bath, Marie sunbathed and ate a crisp little loaf. “It's a good life,” she would murmur, or, “Isn't it lovely?” No-one, not even Marie Curie, was allowed to say anything more about the beauty of Larcou?st. It was one of the things that were not done. Larcou?st was the loveliest place in the world. Everybody knew it and so it was not necessary to say so.

At mid-day the boats went home to the songs of the crews. Marie, bare-foot and bare-legged, her sandals in her hand, picked up her skirts and waded to the shore through the black mud where the white gulls sat in crowds.

The company lunched in their own homes, but most of them returned to Taschen at two to sail in the yacht Wild Rose. The yachts and the boats all belonged to Seignobos. Everything belonged to him, but he was one of those people who liked their possessions to be the property of all their friends. Marie did not sail; she found sitting in a sailing yacht too slow an occupation. Instead, she sat at home in her lighthouse correcting science papers; or she took her spade, her fork and her secateurs and gardened. Her reeds and brambles drew her blood; her unexpected rocks twisted her ankle, or she crushed her own fingers with her hammer; but she paid no attention to small matters. At six she bathed again and went to Taschen to keep the oldest old lady company and watch for the return of the Wild Rose. Its sails, golden in the setting sun, appeared just before dinner, and its wild happy crew came back to Taschen, the girls' hair decorated with the carnations Seignobos gave them each day from his garden.

After dinner everyone went back to Taschen through the everopen door. Perhaps they played games, simple games like word-making or charades. Sometimes there was a ball. An accordion played the music for old-fashioned dances, and everybody danced together—scientists and peasants, servants and masters.

Sometimes on fine nights, Marie and Irène and Eve went armin-arm for walks in the dark along mysterious, winding paths by the wine-dark sea. Did some sudden wind, bringing the booming of great breakers from beyond the reefs, remind Marie that, like the sea, her Radium was radiant yet dangerous? Larcou?st is near to Paimpol. The Larcou?stians played all day with a sunfit sea; but the men of Paimpol were the men of the Iceland fisheries who knew best the dark and bitter strangeness of the sea.

Every year in her holidays Marie played with the glittering, innocent sea. In her worktime, she played with Radium. She breathed in its rays. It burnt her hands, for she disdained the leaden shields which she made other people wear. It did strange, mysterious things with her blood. It puzzled the greatest doctors of France.

It was not till one summer day, July the 4th, 1934, when Marie Curie lay dead of an unknown illness at Sancellemoz in the mountains, that the doctors guessed that she had died from too great friendliness with her great discovery, Radium.